V lkomna (n stan) allihopa! Mellan kategoriserade olikheter och radikal skillnad

Welcome (almost) everyone! Between social categories and radicaldifference. This article explores the dilemmas involved in welcoming differences in education without simultaneously fostering structural conditions that reproduce discrimination and intolerance. Taking an excerpt from Fanny Abj rnsson’s doctoral thesis I en klass f r sig (2004) and Jacques Derrida’s deconstructions of the concept of hospitality as points of departure, the article unfolds in three parts. First, I make a distinction between two ways of responding to the otherness of the other: a conditional welcoming of social categories, and an unconditional welcoming of radical difference. These are further explored in part two. In part three I turn to he “double responsiveness” Derrida highlights as inherent in the paradoxes of hospitality, and ask how it is possible to act within this tension in relation to education. I argue that the welcoming of differences in education demands sensitivity to ambiguity and uncertainty, as well as tact and improvisation in concrete pedagogical situations.